The proliferation of the Internet has led to the creation of a new form of commerce, generally referred to as Internet commerce or E-commerce. E-commerce enables the users to sell and purchase items from a worldwide community connected via the Internet. This added simplicity, coupled with the continually reduced costs and increasing processing speed of modern-day computers, has led to the inclusion of a personal computer (PC) in many homes throughout the world. Unfortunately, the proliferation of PCs within the homes throughout the world, as well as the use of such PCs for E-commerce, often results in the storage of sensitive information within a computer.
As a result, computer users become susceptible to rogue agents, which may desire to gain access to secure information loaded within a personal computer. In order to combat the various rogue agents from gaining access to the secure information, many computer systems employ some form of cryptographs in order to prevent access to sensitive information. As known to those skilled in the art, cryptography provides a technique for keeping information secret, for determining that the information has not been tampered with and for determining who authored pieces of information.
One form of cryptography involves public or private key systems wherein transmitted information is encrypted prior to transmission and decrypted by the receiver using either a public or private key. However, once the sensitive information arrives at its designated location, the information is often decrypted and stored. In other words, the sensitive information is not maintained in a secure format at its destination. As a result, during operation of a PC, a rogue agent could possibly gain access to the PC and gain access to the sensitive information.
Furthermore, the proliferation of E-commerce has led to the availability of media applications, such as motion pictures and music, which may be downloaded to a PC for one-time use or for use for a predetermined period of time. Unfortunately, without some mechanism for protecting the contents of such media applications from access by rogue agents, E-commerce with regard to media applications may be prohibitive to the media providers. One technique for possibly protecting the sensitive information of a computer system is memory encryption. Unfortunately, memory encryption is currently not performed within modern computer systems due to the bottleneck that currently exists between processors and memory.
Although processor speeds continually increase in response to the growing demands of media and graphics applications, memory performance increases have not kept pace with the reduction in processor clock periods. The problems of memory latency, or the time required to access a data unit, in addition with the increasing bandwidth of such media and graphics applications, require innovative memory architectures if processor performance is to continue to increase. As a result, performing memory encryption by, for example a microprocessor, is not feasible because the memory encryption in read operations would introduce additional latency beyond the current bottleneck that exists between processors and memory.